Karl Walling is a professor at the United States Naval War College Monterey Program. Professor Walling's views do not represent the position of the United States government, the Department of the Navy, or the United States Naval War College

April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declares to Congress that America would “make the world itself at last free.”

In asking us to consider alternative histories of American responses to the Great War, Walter McDougall provides a splendid model of what the strategic theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, called “critical analysis.” Said the famous Prussian war college professor, it is not enough to complain that the results of a particular strategic decision were bad. One must also look at the alternatives. “Critical analysis is not just an evaluation of the means actually employed, but of all possible means—which first have to be formulated, that is, invented. One can, after all, not condemn a method without being able to suggest a…

Walter McDougall’s trenchant Liberty Forum essay on Saint Woodrow and the Great War is as much concerned with the present and future of American foreign policy or grand strategy as with the past.
The closing reference to Donald Trump warns the current administration and its supporters to sustain their focus on U.S. national interest as the…

My congratulations to Richard Reinsch for selecting this outstanding panel and thanks to the commentators for their fair and insightful reviews. All of them have addressed the topic for the standpoint of their particular expertise – church history in Richard Gamble’s case, grand strategy in Karl Walling’s case, and constitutional theory in Paul Carrese’s case…

A South Korean navy ship fires a missile during a drill aimed to counter North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile test on July 6, 2017. (Photo by South Korean Defense Ministry via Getty Images)

For the great strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz, strategy is about the imaginative search for options to achieve objectives and a critical analysis of which one is best.

Sometimes there are no good options and one must select the least bad option.

Andrew Bacevich, a graduate of West Point and a Vietnam Veteran who later earned a Ph.D. in history at Princeton and taught at Boston University, has already written two critiques of American defense policy and strategy that have made the New York Times best seller list. This book seems likely to become a third. Its thesis is simple: the disparate theaters of American military engagement in the Greater Middle East, extending as far as Pakistan and Afghanistan in the East and toward Libya and beyond in the West, reveal a consistent pattern of strategic incoherence on the part of the…

(Self-appointed) Caliph: I have called you, the members of the IS National Security Council, together today in my bunker to discuss future strategy in light of the Orlando shooting in the US, the growth of right wing nationalist movements in Europe and the US, and our current situation on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Remember, our objectives are first to retain our state and second to expand it. Let’s start with the views of our military chief of staff. How are we doing?

American Presidents often justify their foreign policies in terms of doctrines. Most of them concern the conditions under which the United States will or will not intervene militarily abroad. A brief review of those doctrines suggests that Americans have lost much of the self-restraint that the early doctrines especially were meant to inculcate. As American foreign policy doctrines shifted from countering foreign intervention in the 19th century to regime change in the 21st century, the costs of this loss of self-restraint have escalated exponentially. Shifting to doctrines focused on regime change has destabilized the Middle East for at least a generation and made a lasting peace within that region or between it and the United States highly unlikely.

Unfortunately for sober foreign policy discussions, the United States is beginning another election cycle with seventeen months left before the next presidential election. Foreign powers affected by American foreign policy are not unaware of American election cycles. To the shame of several American political candidates, the candidates are not averse to using such powers, and being used by them, to further their electoral prospects. So it should come as no surprise that the recently agreed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program (14 July 2015) has become the object of fierce controversy.

By the end of March, 2015, it is conceivable that the members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany, the so-called 5+1 group, will reach an agreement with Iran to halt its suspected nuclear weapons development program and ease the economic sanctions that have isolated Iran from much of the world’s trading system. Even before the ink is dry on the possible agreement, however, it has become the subject of partisan controversy in the United States, Israel, and Iran. Before evaluating the merits of the agreement, it may therefore be worthwhile for readers of a journal devoted to Law…

Carlotta Gall, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist for the New York Times with 10 years of experience covering the American war in Afghanistan, argues that the United States has been fighting the wrong enemy in Afghanistan. The enemy is not the Taliban, but rather Pakistan, which manipulates the Taliban and other Islamist groups to wage proxy wars against it neighbors in Afghanistan and India.
As a journalist, Gall makes her case through judiciously chosen and narrated vignettes. She is careful not to reveal her sources, but one story after another enables her to build an overwhelming circumstantial case that Pakistan is what…

As a form of prudence, strategy is an important, but often neglected dimension of American political thought, a bridge between American principles and American foreign policy objectives. Moreover, since the dawn of the Cold War at least, Americans have led the world in this kind of thinking, though almost always with worries that strategies to provide for national security may boomerang to undermine principles of freedom at home or prove incompatible with such principles abroad. This is especially true in counterinsurgencies in which special operations forces abroad work at the edge of the law or outside of what the law…

Much of American military and diplomatic history can be told in terms of military intervention and counter intervention, as well as debates about the justice and prudence of using force this way. One of the fundamental purposes of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 was to persuade third parties, like France, Spain, and the Netherlands, to intervene in the conflict against Great Britain. Since France supplied upwards of 90% of the arms and ammunition the Americans used and provided not only a navy but also an army larger than the force of Continental soldiers George Washington brought to the…

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